RoverTa has stopped her legs……. She has turned her high heels, with a bleeding mouth like Jose Alfredo’s white horse, towards the warmth of her home land, with the memories and the melancholy of everything that has passed before, proud of having ridden the entire continent and even though from the start her final destination was always Nogales, after so many months she realizes that in fact in only a couple of days she will cross the border of her town, so the anxiety makes her heart beat stronger.

Spring went by while we were crossing the southern US. Autumn received us in the Northeast and Canada, and as if it were a date where one should be there on time we arrive to the Arctic Circle in Alaska on the day of the first winter snow storm. The road had been long, for days we had been sleeping in places where the pine trees could protect us from the weather, with some wolves that every day sang to us in our sleep or didn’t let us come down from the tent, even though they smelled Roverta’s legs to recognize her, so between buffaloes and bears who came to see and check out the foreigners on their land, at last we slept comfortably under the parking lot lights of a Wal-Mart in Fairbanks Alaska to continue the next day and return to the inhospitable and reach the North of the world.

There are one thousand miles back and forth from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, where only the first 70 miles give a breath of tranquility because there is pavement, which gets very complicated with the snow! I was later wishing for the dirt road because Roverta’s high-heel shoes have a better grip; some of the trucks carrying oil or supplies waved at us greeting the strangers on the tundra territory. The color of the sky is different, the sun is always on the south rising on the southeast and taking a ride towards the southwest never reaching a middle point in the sky. With additional gasoline on the roof, water, charged batteries for the equipment and a small engine oil leak we reach the Arctic Circle after eight months, 20 hours and 28 minutes since the moment we left from Pirinola Hill in Nogales, Sonora.

The sky ceases to send us the white storm and the stars come out, an excellent opportunity to see the aurora borealis or “northern lights” and have this daring feat rewarded with such a marvelous celestial event; we waited even with the howling of the wolves close to us but it never came to our unscheduled visit. We spent the night at -17 degrees Celsius, which according to the local folks is not that cold and we should feel lucky for having a favorable weather for this time of year. The water inside the car and all the liquids and medications have frozen, even the car’s CD player is having trouble to sing us a melody. We were looking forward to seeing the Arctic Ocean but we couldn’t because due to the weather we weren’t allowed to pass even though we insisted.

Never before had I felt anxious to get home, never before had so many memories come to my mind, never before had I been afraid in a difficult time, that day everything was part of the landscape and the bad weather was making things worse. Being isolated by days we knew that if something happened over there no one would find us quickly and we were worried about not being able to send life signals to the south towards where the sun always tries to keep us a little warm.

We have arrived at Anchorage, the state capital of Alaska. We crossed the tundra, the snow storms, the Denali and 800 miles of roads. The desolated landscapes and Northern plains had only changed to snowy mountains; at last the cell phone rings telling us that we have a signal, that we are once again in civilized territory.

We must leave Alaska and we believe that by mid-October we should be back home.